The organization with one website and twenty voices
The homepage says "We're a trusted partner for residents." The program department's page says "We leverage community-centred approaches to facilitate sustainable outcomes." The communications team's event listings read like internal memos. The special projects page looks like it came from a different organization entirely.
Every author was doing their best. Nobody was wrong, exactly. But the result is a website that reads like several organizations sharing the same URL, which quietly erodes trust every time a user encounters the inconsistency.
This is the brand governance problem on multi-author websites, closely connected to the broader challenge of web content governance. It isn't solved by more meetings. It's solved by structure.
What brand governance actually means for web content
Brand governance on a website is the set of decisions, systems, and workflows that ensure content published to your site consistently represents your organization's intended voice, tone, visual identity, and quality standards.
It covers:
Brand governance isn't about restricting who can contribute. It's about creating conditions where contributors can publish confidently without accidentally diluting the brand.
Why governance breaks down
The most common reason brand governance fails on multi-author sites is that the governance is human-dependent rather than system-supported. When consistency relies on a single person reviewing everything before it goes live, that system breaks down whenever that person is busy, on leave, or simply no longer in the role.
Governance also fails when:
A governance structure that works
1. Define roles clearly
Every person who touches the website should have a defined role with specific permissions. The three most common roles in a practical governance model are:
Author: Can create and edit draft content in their designated section. Cannot publish without review.
Editor/reviewer: Can review and approve content in a designated area or for a defined content type. Can approve drafts for publication. Responsible for brand consistency within their scope.
Web publisher or digital manager: Has authority over the overall site structure, navigation, global content, and escalated decisions. Approves anything that sits outside a defined content area or that touches site-wide elements.
Map your CMS user permissions to these roles. Most CMS platforms support role-based publishing permissions.
2. Build a lightweight editorial checklist
Before any content goes live, an editor should be able to check it against a short list of standards. Keep it to ten items or fewer:
A checklist this short takes five minutes to complete. If it takes longer, the content needs more work before it goes live.
3. Create templates and constrained content types
The most durable brand governance happens before a word is written. When your CMS templates control the structure of content (title field, summary field, body with defined heading options, standard CTA block), authors make fewer brand decisions inadvertently.
Content types with constrained fields are especially effective. If every staff profile has the same fields in the same order, staff profiles will be consistent by default. If every service page uses the same layout structure, service pages will look and feel cohesive without editorial review catching every visual inconsistency.
Work with your CMS or development team to model content types based on your actual content inventory. The more decisions the template makes, the fewer brand corrections you need to make after the fact.
4. Build approval workflows inside the CMS
Approval workflows should be automated where possible, as part of CMS workflows designed to scale with your team. Most CMS platforms support some version of this: content submitted by an author triggers an email or notification to the designated reviewer, and publication requires the reviewer's explicit action.
When approval lives outside the CMS (a separate email thread, a Teams message, a verbal "looks good"), it creates gaps: approvals go unrecorded, unapproved content goes live, and there's no audit trail for when and by whom content was approved.
Automate the workflow, keep it inside the CMS, and make the approval state visible to all stakeholders.
5. Designate a brand steward
Someone needs to own brand standards on the web and have the organizational authority to enforce them. This isn't a full-time job at most organizations, but it's a named responsibility. Without it, there's no one to maintain a style guide that editors actually use, resolve disputes between authors and reviewers, or update standards when the brand evolves.
The brand steward doesn't review every page. They set and maintain the standards that enable reviewers and authors to make consistent decisions without escalating everything.
Handling brand drift after launch
Even with the best governance structure, brand drift happens over time. Seasonal content gets rushed. New staff members haven't been properly onboarded. A vendor-published microsites veers from the main site's standards.
Schedule a quarterly brand audit: a structured review of a sample of recently published pages against your editorial checklist. Look for patterns more than individual violations. If the same issue keeps appearing in the same section of the site, the workflow or training for that section isn't working.
This doesn't have to be exhaustive. Reviewing 20 pages per quarter against a 10-item checklist takes an afternoon and gives you a clear trend line over time.
If your site has multiple authors and brand consistency is slipping, get in touch and we can build a governance structure that holds without requiring constant oversight.